Month: December 2015

What is Geocaching? Well, like most, I didn’t know what it was about at all until I did some research.

Turns out it’s simple! It is the latest craze sweeping through bored and strapped for cash households.

Geocaching, also referred to as GPS stash hunting, is a recreational activity in which someone “buries” something for others to try to find using a Global Positioning System ( GPS ) receiver or download an app with the feature. The pursuit can be thought of as a GPS-enabled treasure hunt. Usually, a geocache consists of a small, waterproof container that holds a logbook and inexpensive trinkets. Participants are called geocachers.

It is very interesting and I’ve completed my first geocache hunt here on the Glendale Community College campus. 🙂 Have fun reading and learning more about geocaching!

I remember driving my grandma Grace around one day…she was speaking to me in our native language and she explained to me how tires are made from trees.

My grandma is a sweet Navajo woman, she has experienced life to the fullest; she is a well traveled cowgirl, equestrian, actress, rug weaver, model and mother/grandmother. How does she know about Hevea Brasiliensis?!

I never knew such a topic was of concern to my grandma all the way in Arizona, in the barren desert of the American Southwest. I was surprised and happily listening to what she knows, Grandma was talking about how the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed and exploited for rubber.

As I was listening to her I was smiling ear to ear because my grandma was truly concerned for what happens to this Earth and the rainforest, and I am her granddaughter. Some of her spirit is in me; Hence, my interest in the Environment.

David C. Roy studied engineering, physics, and chemistry and ended up obtaining a physics degree from Boston University. Although it seems unlikely he gained an interest for art. He was influenced by his wife and his interest in motion which led him to create kinetic sculptures. His work is usually made of wood running on wind-up mechanisms and not on electricity. He has a studio in Connecticut where people can enjoy his artwork.

This November, gamer-culture-extraordinaire website Kotaku was the first to uncover a treasure to both the fields of Astronomy and Ludology. Sound surprising? To me it sounds like just more STEAM.

It was prized from deep within the Library of Congress vaults, a game design document of sorts penned by the beautiful Carl Sagan back in 1983. He writes of an interstellar adventure of epic (and educational) proportions. It would have been a movie tie-in(naturally), with the game’s counterpart having been Contact.

Below is the manuscript, taken from of The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, which was entered into the LoC by the titular parties back in 2013. Enjoy:

Raph Koster is already a legend in game design circles. But alas, the man is a polymath; he’s released a book of poems called “Sunday Poems“. By the way, he creates in a (dare I say) STEAM-y fashion. What follows is a poem entitled “Ode to Code: A Geek Poem” I found it here. Enjoy:

Just think:
The twine of sine
and cosine, twang of tangents,
tangles of angles and twirls of tris,
the way each curve is wavelength,
like a sound is wavelength, light is
wavelength. A four forty’s tone
is blue, its hertz a wiggle,
wobble, flow from
high to low, a
nanometer’s
drunken walk
the shade of skies.

Perhaps by this was Schumann
driven mad; the way the math invades,
pervades, like A four forty in his ear
for years: a cosmic radio of audio
uncaused by any known thing.
Oh, the song was blue,
but blues were
something
Schumann
never heard.
Or always did.
Or thought he always did.

The azimuth, horizon, incidence;
The cadence, coda, recapitulation.
These are all the whirlwind tang of life:
From helices in mitochondria to lacy
fractal leaves to strings vibrating
quarks, and time we see
cross-sectioned.
Here we
have the arc
of it, the seconds. Mark.
And now, we twist our code
in loops, recurse in tighter spirals, flow
through chains of consequence—input
output GIGO FILO—at play with toys
that mimic magic, reify and
retro-fy, a Bezier here,
vector there,
a wave
of bosses, twirl
Of blues, a count of lives, all binary.

Ocean wave energy is captured directly from surface waves or from pressure fluctuations below the surface.

Waves are caused by the wind blowing over the surface of the ocean. In many areas of the world, the wind blows with enough consistency and force to provide continuous waves along the shoreline. Ocean waves contain tremendous energy potential. Wave power devices extract energy from the surface motion of ocean waves or from pressure fluctuations below the surface.

Ocean Wave Energy Resource

Wave power varies considerably in different parts of the world. Areas of the world with abundant wave power resource include the western coasts of Scotland, northern Canada, southern Africa, Australia, and the northwestern coast of the United States, particularly Alaska.

Whereas wind resource potential is typically given in gigawatts (GW), wave and tidal resource potential is typically given in terawatt-hours/year (TWh/yr). The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has completed a recent analysis of the U.S. wave energy resource potential, available here. EPRI estimates the total wave energy resource along the outer continental shelf at 2,640 TWh/yr. That is an enormous potential, considering that just 1 TWh/yr of energy will supply around 93,850 average U.S. homes with power annually. While an abundance of wave energy is available, it cannot be fully harnessed everywhere for a variety of reasons, such as other competing uses of the ocean (i.e. shipping, commercial fishing, naval operations) or environmental concerns in sensitive areas. Therefore, it is important to consider how much resource is recoverable in a given region. EPRI estimates that the total recoverable resource along the U.S. shelf edge is 1,170 TWh/yr, which is almost one third of the 4,000 TWh of electricity used in the United States each year.

Indu the Asian elephant is one of the zoo’s biggest attractions, and she is getting ready to celebrate her golden birthday. And zoo officials are making sure the party is done in style.

Indu’s 50th birthday party will be held on Saturday, December 19. The party will begin at 10 a.m., when Indu gets a birthday cake. That will be followed by presents at 1 p.m. Fans are welcome to bring Indu a birthday gift.

So what do you get the elephant who has everything? The zoo encourages fans to bring the elephant unopened spices, like cinnamon, parsley, basil, thyme or paprika; unopened and sealed popcorn….

Ed Kabotie’s “Yellow Snow on the Mountain,” part of the “You Are On Indian Land” exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona, addresses the uses of reclaimed water at Snowbowl in Flagstaff. Ryan Williams/NHO

“You Are On Indian Land” exhibit at Museum of Northern Arizona addresses cultural appropriation, stereotypes and sovereignty

The name of the exhibition, “You Are on Indian Land,” comes from the 1969-1971 Indians From All Tribes and American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation of Alcatraz Island by John Trudell, among others, which began on Nov. 20, 1969, also the date the show opened in New York at Radiator Gallery.

Those themes include contested landscapes, misappropriation of culture and, even more broadly, what the human condition is in the 21st century.

“It highlights that these are a contemporary people and they have contemporary ideas just like anybody else,” Joyce said.

Museum of Northern Arizona is the exhibition’s final stop and the show runs until Feb. 15, 2016.

Fantasy turns to reality when people set creativity into motion. Whether movie producers predicted this phenomenon to happen or not, Star Wars made a huge global impact as far as the future was concerned some 38 years ago. #STEAM